Being hailed as one of the world’s greatest guitarists has been a blessing and, perhaps, a curse of sorts for former Vista and Mission Hills resident Allan Holdsworth, who returns for a Friday performance at Brick By Brick in Bay Park.

Apart from Jeff Beck and the late Les Paul, Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt, no other guitarist I can think of consistently inspires such awe with their exceptional skill, sensitivity and singular musical vision. And none I can think of also inspires such glowing admiration from their fellow guitar greats.

Indeed, no six-string star I’ve interviewed — from Eddie Van Halen, John McLaughlin and George Benson to Tom Morello, Carlos Santana and San Diego’s Mike Keneally — hasn’t been happy to sing Holdsworth’s praises at length. The late Frank Zappa, a former San Diegan who was notoriously hard to impress, once went so far as to hail Holdsworth “for single-handedly reinventing the electric guitar.”

It was a fair statement more than 30 years ago -- and Holdsworth has only become more accomplished and rewarding to hear in the decades since then.

"The dialect Allan has created on the guitar is incredible," Leucadia guitar ace Peter Sprague told me a few years ago. "A lot of people have been influenced by Allan, but I don't think there was anyone playing like him before he came along."

Keneally, who himself rose to prominence as the "stunt guitarist" in Zappa's band in the 1980s, agreed.

"Allan's vocabulary and technique are so unique to him that it comes across as a completely new approach to the instrument and to music," Keneally noted a few years ago. "I've seen incredibly gifted and technically capable guitarists have the life drawn from their faces as they watch Allan's hands and try to figure out what he does. It's completely astonishing and absolutely beautiful."

McLaughlin was equally effusive, telling me: "Allan is amazing. I can't understand how he does what he does -- and I've told him."

A native of England who now lives in the Dana Point area, Holdsworth first earned attention -- and gasps of amazement -- in the early 1970s as the guitarist and violinist in Tempest, a powerhouse English band led by former Colosseum drummer Jon Heisman. American audiences discovered the budding guitar great a few years later, when he teamed up with former Miles Davis Quintet drummer Tony Williams in the New Tony Williams Lifetime.

The resulting album, "Believe It!", was a fiery fusion of jazz, rock and funk that still impresses today and Holdsworth's bravura solo on the song "Fred" is one I have happily played on "San Diego Sessions," my weekly Sunday afternoon radio show on KSDS Jazz 88.3 FM. The show has also featured an array of selections from various Holdsworth solo albums, in particular 1996's superb "None Too Soon."